Newton Health Care Center

Although we didn't give this facility a good overall grade, we actually gave it a strong grade in nursing, where it received a B. When determining a nursing home's nursing rating, we weigh the number of hours nurses commit to patients as well as the skill levels of the nurses. This nursing home averages 0.3 hours of nursing care per resident per day. Finally, we also looked at some nursing quality measures in determining our nursing grades. This place performed very well in the area of avoiding major falls and pressure ulcers. We consider these areas to be good indicators of the quality of nursing care.

Surprisingly, this nursing home actually received a good grade in the area of inspections as well. In fact, we awarded it a B for that category, which is one of our better scores. Not many nursing homes that were this poor overall earned multiple category grades of this caliber. Inspection ratings weigh a host of factors included in a nursing home's inspection reports. One key criteria we rely on is the quantity and severity of deficiencies. You generally want to avoid places with a bunch of deficiencies flagged. While this nursing home had a few minor dings on its government inspection report, it had zero severe deficiencies. Severe deficiencies are those found in categories G through L. This tells you that CMS did not consider any of the deficiencies on this facility's report to pose an imminent threat to patient safety or health. A couple minor deficiencies aren't necessarily the end of the world.

This facilities next most favorable area was short-term care. We gave it a grade of C in this area. This is basically a slightly below average score in this category. In computing our short-term care scores, we size up a facility's levels of highly skilled nursing, which includes registered nurses, physical therapists occupational therapists and other highly skilled individuals. This grade is considered to be a fair measure of the facility's rehabilitation. We were surprised to find that this nursing home was below average in the two key staffing areas we looked at. It supplied fewer registered nurse and physical therapist hours per resident than most other nursing homes. The last metric we assessed in this area is the percentage of residents that eventually returned home from the nursing home. We found that just 4.9 percent of this nursing home's residents returned home.

Switching gears to the final area, this nursing home really did not perform well in this area either. With a rock bottom grade of F in long-term care, this is really as terrible as it gets. When facilities receive a grade in this range in this category it generally means the facility didn't perform well in our measures relating to patient care. Once we looked at the quantity of care provided by nurses aids and other staff, we then analyzed the nursing home's vaccination data. We were somewhat surprised to discover that this facility vaccinated only 87.87879 percent of its residents for pneumonia. Surprisingly, this place was actually able to limit hospitalizations. With just 0.01 hospitalizations per one thousand long-term resident days, this facility has less hospitalizations than many nursing homes. This is its best feature in this category.